As I’m entering my 9th month of pregnancy, I’m constantly in awe of what the woman’s body is capable of – what my own body is capable of. In February of 2023, we had just returned from our dream wedding in Cartagena. We had planned on trying to get pregnant later that year, and I wanted to do a boudoir shoot to capture the body I was in at that time. I just wanted to look at the photos one day and remember exactly how powerful I felt in that chapter – confident, sensual, and strong, always capable of carrying whatever I asked of it.
I could never have anticipated everything that my body was about to go through.
What followed over the next two years was two miscarriages, questions that went unanswered in between, countless doctors appointments, testing, unforeseen setbacks, retrievals, and all along the way, more disappointment than I ever expected to carry. Experiencing infertility and going through IVF have a way of making you feel like your body is working against you — like it’s failing at the one thing you’re asking it to do, over and over again. There were stretches where “powerful” was the last word I would have used to describe how I felt in my own skin.
After finding out we were pregnant 2 weeks after the transfer, I was still holding my breath until the next checkup. For the first 3-4 months of my pregnancy, it was like I was constantly waiting for unexpected bad news to hit again. It wasn’t until after our second full anatomy scan around 20 weeks that I really allowed myself to feel the full excitement about what was growing inside me. Around that time I started feeling our baby’s flutters regularly. With each week and month that passed, as the flutters and kicks grew stronger, so did the love and appreciation I regained for my body. Right before our baby shower, I decided to do a maternity shoot 28 weeks into my pregnancy, to celebrate my body again for an entirely different reason.
Same body, almost exactly three years apart. Except this time, it’s not just holding a pose — it’s carrying a whole life.
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